2013 quan điểm về phong trào gulen của gary wood và tugrul keskin xã hội học về hồi giáo

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Sociology of Islam (2013) 127–130 brill.com/soi Perspectives on the Gülen Movement Gary Wood and Tugrul Keskin Editors The world is changing—for better or worse depends on one’s social, political and economic perspective This change is variously amplified within Islamic and Muslim societies, which are seemingly in constant flux in the neoliberal era The economic dynamics of this era shape and remake our daily lives as they are expressed within the shifting theo-politics that partially defines and certainly affects these regions As daily life is altered social movements respond by pivoting or anchoring themselves in relation to over-arching changes emblematic of the neo-liberal state No movement is static and each must balance its relation to local communities as well as to the broader global currents of change In this way, seemingly localized movements are required to orient part of their vision to more contemporary forms of expression of the state and its actors Among Islamic-framed movements, we can see this glaringly in the cases of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jama’at, Hamas, and other such organizations In light of these challenges and our responses to them, the Turkish Gülen or Hizmet (“service”) movement is no exception Indeed, this movement presents an empirical example of an extensive contemporary social movement mobilizing across social spheres within a decidedly Islamic and global social context This issue of Sociology of Islam turns its gaze toward this movement in a number of global settings and socio-political contexts In recent years, particularly given Turkey’s resurgence as a powerful economic player in the global economy, the Gülen movement has become a salient player in the social, political and economic landscape of the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the United States In the 1960s, Fethullah Gülen had a small group of followers in Kestanepazari, in Izmir Turkey By the 1970s, following population trends motivated by economic liberalism, many in the movement community moved to Turkey’s largest cities, organized study groups and established once-a-week meetings to collectively read the Risale-i Nur; risales written by Said Nursi © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2014 DOI 10.1163/22131418-00104001 128 Editorial / Sociology of Islam (2013) 127–130 throughout the first half of the twentieth century and a foundational text within the movement This pattern of reading and interpreting this tafsir, and the bonding of followers achieved through a more modern (and not uncontroversial) exigesis of classical Islamic texts, strongly connected to vibrations of a newfound twentieth century view of world connectedness Nursi wrote these risales through two major world wars and significant militarized conflict in Asia The Gülen movement, relying on these texts, was then forming in the shadow of globally dividing wars in Asia, particularly the Southeast; wars that had their own roots in global divisions over economic social policy pitting the Soviet socialist model against the liberal market model of the u.s and much of Europe This collective social action and tight bonding of the Gülen followers throughout the 1970s prepared the movement to take advantage of the Turkish military coup of September 12th, 1980 Within Turkish politics, this event opened a new avenue for Islamic groups and movements already at work in Turkey The neoliberal conditions of the military regime opened opportunities for those groups whose view of the theo-secular balance across all spheres of social life aligned with on-the-ground neo-liberal political conditions of the day The Gülen movement was ideally suited to take advantage of this opening aided by economic transformations of the Turkish economy, which were guided by a powerful subscriber of neo-liberal ideas, Turgut Ozal First as Prime Minister then as President, Ozal created economic and social opportunities for the movement through his policies of privatization and change in the relations between the state and the economy, which necessarily, in Turkey, intersected with expressions of Islam These opportunities grew exponentially under the conditions of economic liberalization of the global economy of the 1980s and 1990s Coincident to these developments, and certainly exacerbated by the ongoing reconfiguration of the global economy, the collapse of the Soviet Union generated unexpected economic and political consequences for the Turkish-speaking world The Gülen movement and its followers were able to economically leverage the Central Asian economic gap left by the collapse of the political center of the socialist economic model Many followers of Gülen invested heavily in Central Asian economies, particularly Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan In this era, they also extended their growing network of schools from Turkey to the Central Asian republics These Gülen-inspired “Turkish schools” were openly welcomed by the bureaucratic elite of Central Asian states and were actively supported by Turkish presidents Turgut Ozal and Suleyman Demirel The economic and social benefits obtained in Central Asia and Turkey led the Gülen movement to seek more political power within the Turkish Editorial / Sociology of Islam (2013) 127–130  129 political system This move, however, was pitted against a rising tide of military opposition to Turkey’s first elected Islamist government The February 28, 1997, “post-modern coup” was conducted without resort to militarized confrontation and led to the resignation of the pro-Islamist president Necmettin Erbakan This realignment forced the Gülen movement to seek further opportunities outside of Turkey Amidst this backlash against Islamic-based rule in Turkey, the charismatic leader Fethullah Gülen self-exiled to a small town in Pennsylvania in the u.s Meanwhile, students of the pro-Islamists Erbakan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul sought to establish a new pro-Islamic political party in Turkey that would in a few short years, in 2002, come to power with a majority vote in national elections Gülen and his followers once-again saw this opportunity that linked their neo-liberal economic tendencies to their contemporary interpretation of Islam and the movement threw its weight behind the new pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (jdp/akp) This was more a move of convenience than a tight alignment of the ultimate goals of the party or of Gülen Scholars seem to have mis-understood this collaboration as an example of Islamists uniting against the secular Turkish state Few scholars paid attention to the specific differences and origins of these two political movements and this oversight contributed to conflicts that have ignited in recent years The Gülen movement today is a 25 billion dollar (us) business, including a global network of charter schools in the us and of private schools that stretch from the African continent to Vietnam The movement’s network also controls a media empire including newspapers, book publishing, and tv stations throughout the u.s., Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa In short, the Gülen movement has become a truly corporatized transnational network Despite the proliferation of the movement and its undeniable economic success, the religious origins and common roots seem to have, in terms of political influence, weakened the movement and transformed into something more like a policy-oriented economic network that challenges the economic and political power of the state, and most recently, of Erdogan’s jdp/akp vision for Turkey The movement’s followers have played major roles in significant, if localized, political conflicts in Turkey, including being implicated in a major role in the Ergenekon trials surrounding what is conspiratorially called “the deep state” in Turkey The future of the Gülen movement will depend on internal and external factors in Turkey as well as the global conditions of the neo-liberal world order Despite the significant role that the movement has played in contemporary Turkish-centered politics (and all that implies with Turkey’s role as a u.s partner at the gateway to the East) to date there have been few 130 Editorial / Sociology of Islam (2013) 127–130 sufficient contextual analyses written on the Gülen movement Many scholars and activists have either glorified or demonized Fethullah Gülen and the movement’s followers, and thus have failed to adequately address its sociological impact In this issue of Sociology of Islam we have attempted to facilitate an examination of the movement from a variety of perspectives and in a number of global contexts, including outside Turkey We are thankful to associate editor Joshua D Hendrick for his service in coordinating this issue His knowledge of the Gülen movement is on display throughout Surely we will not be able, in these pages, to share every story that could be told about this powerful movement, but within the limitations of this space our hope is to further a sociological analysis of the movement without the ideological biases so common in much of the public reading on the subject